The exploitation of natural resources for timber production, fuelwood use and conversion to agricultural land is increasing to such an extent that the sustainable use of many areas of the world is in doubt. This paper examines three decades of freely available Landsat satellite images of the northeastern part of Nigeria using a supervised classification based technique to create maps of vegetation change in Yobe State. The maps are then used to examine the temporal and spatial aspects of changes which have occurred in the context of previous evidence and literature. The results indicate that the vegetation of the area has drastically reduced since the 1970's. However, as this study shows, the pattern of these changes is complicated and cannot be explained by any single physical or anthropogenic causal factor. Similarly, evidence from ground truthing investigation indicates the importance of fuelwood collection to the deforestation process within the region. This article shows the value of an existing remote sensing and image processing methodology for the assessment of vegetation change in developing countries in relation to the sustainable management of natural resources. The study also discusses the overall change within the study area and discusses several potential causative factors of the observed patterns of change.
This paper describes a research project that has been conducted as part of the Kano Municipal waste management strategy. The aim is to quantify and to identify the existing locations of waste disposal sites by mapping their spatial distribution within the metropolitan Kano. QUICKBIRD satellite imageries; locations of existing waste disposal sites collected using Global Positioning System (GPS); and topographical map (1:5000 scale) of Kano metropolis were used to generate data for the study. The data were prepared and analysed using ArcMap 10.2.1 and Erdas Imagine 11 software to produce the spatial distribution maps for solid waste disposal sites within the metropolis. The result shows that out of the 300 existing waste disposal sites assessed, the city has fairly well-distributed waste disposal sites. Conversely, the disposal sites are more clustered in the centre of the metropolis than the outskirts. However, about 80 percent of the sites are either located very close to roads, settlements or water bodies. Also, while about 92 percent of the existing waste disposal locations are open space, only about 7 percent are containers (closed dumping sites). Correspondingly, about 89 percent are authorised dumping sites and only about 11 percent are unauthorised illegal. The study recommends that policymakers should intervene and relocate the existing unauthorized dump sites to more suitable areas.
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